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HP Backs Blu-ray Disc Technology
neutron_p writes "Finally HP announced plans to include Blu-ray Disc drives across many of its product lines, including select consumer desktop and notebook PCs, personal workstations and digital entertainment centers. They will start selling PCs equipped with Blu-ray Disc drives in late 2005. An optical disc technology, Blu-ray Disc is poised to replace current DVD technology and become the next standard for personal computing data storage and viewing high-definition movies. More than 70 of the world's leading technology and entertainment companies have committed to the Blu-ray Disc format. Recently, Sharp unveiled Blu-ray disc recorder with Hard Drive/DVD which will be introduced on the Japanese market in December."
Why did the article submitter link to test.wikipedia.org, I wonder? Here's the real article, with 5x the information on the format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
In short, NO.
The DVD and CDRW units use a 'red' laser, where's blueray uses a (get this) blue laser.
Because of this, the whole focus/pit-size differences ensure that the units will not be able to read DVD/CDR. Though I'm sure someone will make a unit which supports both.
Technically there are some differences ...
+R media has better multisession support. With many sessions, it uses only 2 MB overhead on the disc (per session) for whatever data they use to link sessions. In contract, -R media uses much more data in the border zones. (It varies per session, but 3 sessions will have up to 132 MB of overhead.)
Most people don't know that a -R disc holds slightly more data than a +R. It's about 5.5 MB. I was astonished when I found out. Go look up the specs and you will see that this is true. This is not too relevant unless you are trying to back up a DVD that has so much data in 1 layer that it goes into this 5.5 MB limit.
Optical Issues: There are weaknesses in the design of the optical properties. The explanation is long and I really don't understand everything.